Issues in Dispute Before Congress and High Court

Whether the lands under the marginal sea, between low-water mark and the three-mile limit, belong to the respective bordering states or are a part of the public domain of the United States is to be determined soon either by Congress or by the Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee will open hearings Feb. 5 on a House-approved joint resolution abandoning to the states any federal right or interest in the submerged lands. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has given the State of California until Jan. 28 to file its reply to a test suit instituted by the Department of Justice to establish federal claims to submerged lands off the coast of that state.

Enactment of the proposed quitclaim legislation, vigorously pressed by Attorney General Robert W. Kenny of California, would remove the basis of the federal government's case before the Supreme Court and settle the disputed issue once and for all. The attorneys general of most of the states, including those in the interior of the country as well as those along the coasts, are supporting the quitclaim resolution as a measure to protect state rights. Their support has been enlisted on the theory that recognition of federal claims to submerged coastal lands would enable the federal government to assert title also to the land under all navigable waters, to harbor improvements, and to extensive city districts developed on filled land.

Secretary of the Interior Ickes, whose department has jurisdiction over public lands, regards such fears as groundless. In a letter to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, June 20, 1945, he declared: “The issue here is not one of states' rights. It is oil—who owns and who gets some of the specific valuable oil off the coast of California.” As such, the issue “involves the control of the vast wealth and natural resources vital to the security of this nation.” Ickes said that “from the time I first realized that there were substantial legal doubts as to the validity of the states' claim to submerged coastal lands below low-water mark, I felt it inconsistent with my responsibilities as a Cabinet officer to renounce any claims which the United States may have to these lands.” He contended that the dispute was basically a question of law which “should be settled by the courts created by the Constitution and the Congress for that purpose.”